Sunday, December 4, 2016

More level reconfigurations

This week was spent fixing some existing levels. Most noticeably, I edited that new level from last week, taking out the enemies and the warp walls and making it a very simple introduction to switches. Here's what it looked like last week:

And here's what it looks like now:

As before, you deactivate one wall and reactivate another whenever you hit any of the switches. This means that, one switch at a time, this level sends you in a circle (well, I guess in this case a rectangle) until you hit the goal at the bottom of the screen. As before, only one switch is ever accessible to the player at a time, so even though this may still look complex, it's probably the second simplest level in the game.

The other level I changed this week was this one:

I moved the switch to the center from the bottom right corner because I hated the feel of trying to line up the correct approach to the lower boost pad and needing to be careful not to re-hit the switch. I also have the kill walls at the bottom left starting out deactivated. This means that when you hit the switch, one side turns on, while the other side turns off. This makes the level feel a lot more interesting, since you might have to hit the switch twice to complete it, depending on how you want to solve the puzzle.

Moving the switch to the center of the level also allows the enemies to be able to hit the switch, which I have mixed feelings about. I do want enemies to be able to hit switches, but it's hard to direct the player's attention to the switch to teach them that this is happening. Mostly, you're just confused when a switch is flipped without you doing it...

For next week, I plan to take a look at timer levels, and see if I might want to remove them. On one hand, I can create any timer-related puzzle with enemy projectile launchers and swiches. On the other hand, timing is a large part of the puzzle-solving of this game, and I don't want to always have to worry about whether a switch is in range of some random enemy, or whether the player can mess up the sequence of timed objects...

Well, despite not doing much this week, it looks like I managed to write a lot. Just how it goes, some times. Charge-up noise, as always, is by Javier Zumer. Used and modified under this license.